EgyptAir Flight 804's Black Boxes Recovered from Mediterranean

The public may soon learn what caused an EgyptAir jet to plunge into the Mediterranean almost three weeks ago: After homing in on the main wreckage on Wednesday, officials leading the search announced that they had located the Airbus A320’s cockpit voice recorder and recovered it from the bottom of the ocean. On Friday, searchers said they have also recovered the flight data recorder from EgyptAir Flight 804, the second and the most important of the two black boxes that are critical to understanding what caused the plane to crash.

It’s a significant finding, considering that time is running out—the deadline for finding the crucial black box recorders is June 24, as the recorders' batteries generally only last for about a month. The exact timeframe can vary, depending on the location and depth of the crash site, but experts believe that the wreckage is about 10,000 feet below the surface, heightening the challenges for the recovery team. Additionally, according to Egyptian authorities, both devices had to be brought to the surface in stages, as they were extensively damaged, but the investigators were able to retrieve the memory units, which contain the data.

Investigators are said to be encouraged that the technology to find the plane—an emergency locator transmitter and a beacon attached to the data recorders—worked quickly enough to obtain results within the deadline. This was not the case in other recent high profile disasters where investigators were not able to locate black box signals, like the still-unsolved disappearance of Malaysia Airlines 370 and the crash of Air France 447 in 2009.

The plane carrying 66 passengers vanished off radar screens in late May on a flight from Paris to Cairo. The next step will be to analyze the contents of the voice recorder and the data recorder, which could shed light on the cause of the crash, which is still unknown.